In the middle of the presentation, it started to rain outside. The speaker took note, hesitated a while, smiled to herself and told her audience how moved she was by the rain that had been falling ever since she arrived from her country a day earlier.

She was from the southern part of Africa, and, as we know, large areas there have been experiencing serious drought, leaving vast tracts of land parched and all forms of life negatively impacted.

The pleasure was in her eyes and body language, and I wondered why she did not rush out of the room and let herself soak in the not-so -chilly Nairobi downpour.

The poor professor was expressing what all of us feel and say when we come in contact with what we always yearn for but seldom find. Some of us, of course, have cravings for mundane things, things that are usually categorised as wants rather than needs. But water is an absolute need of life, and anyone deprived of water stands in real and present danger of death.

Where this lady comes from they call the national currency “pula,” which is the word for rain; it is that precious. These past few years, many areas in the south have been abandoned by rain and the scorching sun has taken full control of the heavens visiting its punishing intensity on everything below it while we in East Africa are soaking in torrential rain and cursing it.

It is that paradox that hit me that morning in Nairobi last week. When I came back to Dar es Salaam the next day, it was raining cats and dogs here too, and it’s still driving rain as I write. I look out the window and cannot help but think of the professor. I think of the divide between us who are spoilt by too much water and those who are thirsting for a drop to drink.

But then I ask myself why, in the midst of all this water, we let it all go to waste. In many of our cities, towns, villages and hamlets, when the rains come they create rivulets – sometimes these grow into mighty seasonal rivers – that do a cross-country race from the plateaus down to the lower plains, and finally into the sea. All that water is wasted, even when we know that spells of drought do happen.

The landscape in Southern Africa is littered with bodies of water harvested from the falling rains, and it is with this water that the farmers fend off the drought when it does strike – which happens quite often. The practice of building dams to harvest water that would otherwise run into the sea is what intelligent people do.

But, as Prophet Robert Nesta Marley says, “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.”

Intelligent people do other things as well. Every house is built with a gutter system to collect water for use at household level when the municipal water pipelines go dry. This was a practice enforced in our towns during the colonial era, but it seems with Independence people got less intelligent.

In some countries they have developed sophisticated systems for water recycling, so good even water from flushed toilets is made potable. (I know someone who stopped drinking a good Namibian beer when he heard this story, but he had a choice of other beers).

What we must realise is the truth that water is a finite resource that could run out one day. The seasonal droughts we experience are indicative of what that could mean.

I know that a sea of fresh water has been discovered under the dry sands of Turkana and another one just outside Dar es Salaam. On top of that, we still have all these rivers and lakes.

But this does not mean we can allow ourselves to be complacent and profligate. For the time being, we have to consider what we have in terms of water as a buffer, an insurance policy between ourselves and aggravated thirst. It’s a policy that needs to be kept alive and renewed.

It is time for all of us to be water smart, and to take concerted measures that preserve water, wasting as little of it as possible, thinking as much as possible of the rain-excited professor from Botswana.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]